Five inventive artists are taking it outside, producing alfresco works that are as eye-catching and engaging as they are collectible

Whether it aims for a gracious harmony with the landscape or stands in stark contrast to it, outdoor sculpture can offer a uniquely satisfying way to experience art. Viewing works you love again and again in shifting light and changing seasons brings out additional layers of meaning and pleasure. And in an art scene forever reacting to knee-jerk fluctuations of worth and value, the permanence of such pieces is all the more compelling.

But outdoor art often requires a special kind of collector. "Anyone can buy a 30-inch painting," says Candace Worth, a New York art adviser who is always on the lookout for pieces that could work en plein air. "The people who buy outdoor sculpture are on another level entirely."

Why? For starters, producing such works can be complex and costly. Ditto installation and maintenance. As a result, many contemporary artists have avoided the genre. But there is life out there inside the hedges. In the last few years a number of highly regarded artists have been exploring outdoor sculpture in engaging ways, using unexpected materials and moving away from monumentality, at least in spirit, if not in actual scale. What they are creating is variously playful, conceptual, and—while often defying conventional beauty—completely captivating.

Take Carol Bove, a New York artist known for cerebrally minimalist works that explore the intriguing gray areas between art and decor, logic and intuition. When it comes to her outdoor pieces (several were recently exhibited on Manhattan’s High Line), Bove leans in two directions: stark assemblages of steel I-beams or white powder-coated-steel squiggles she calls "Glyphs," which resemble spring coils or the trendy Tangle puzzles that graced so many cocktail tables in the 1980s. Shrugging off any pretense of grandiosity, her forms are exquisite gestures of pure whimsy.

Swiss artist Olaf Breuning, also based in New York, makes puckish, tersely witty sculptures that frequently riff on humanity’s baser instincts. Lately the artist has been casting cartoonish figures for the outdoor realm, absurdist thought balloons and all (in one piece, the head is filled with the words dreams, dreams, dreams, dreams, while a large hand reads dirt, dirt, dirt). His recent commission for the Public Art Fund, on view in Central Park through August 24, features six childishly drawn 2-D aluminum clouds supported some 35 feet off the ground by hilariously crude steel scaffolds that look as if they were cobbled together by the Peanuts gang. Like much of Breuning’s repertoire, the clouds blithely thumb their noses at the noble virtues for which public sculpture stands: dignity, pathos, authenticity, importance.

A far cry from the prankster Breuning, the British-born, Los Angeles–based sculptor Thomas Houseago brings an air of gravitas to his work, embracing art history references and a sense of the handmade. Houseago wants his labors to be visible—the rapture and the anguish, the advances and the retreats—in his hulking figures, whether metal or synthetic plaster. (A big show at Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York, last year only boosted the works’ status among collectors.) Their outsize contours and often grotesque angst call to mind the monsters common in toys and cartoons in the ’80s, when Houseago was young.

Sam Falls, who splits his time between New York and L.A., goes for more of a factory finish with his outdoor sculptures, polychrome aluminum panels that are fastened together to form cheery enclosures reminiscent of ’60s playground designs. But for all their immediate vibrancy, Falls’s creations are explorations of the effects of weather and time. The artist uses UV protection on some panels but not others, meaning the pieces are intended to evolve, their crisp colors fading in uneven fashion as they age.

Taking a more interactive, almost funhouse approach is Jeppe Hein, a Berlin- and Copenhagen-based Danish artist whose perception-distorting geometric forms in mirror-finished stainless steel are designed to be walked around and, occasionally, through. In contrast to ’60s and ’70s Land Art, wherein works were of a piece with the landscape, Hein’s shimmering objects are defiant interruptions, with a futuristic gloss. The very idea of using mirrors, an intrinsically domestic surface, in nature is a daring conceit that pays off. Reflecting and refracting their surroundings, the works delight and confound—in ways only great outdoor sculpture can do.

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